Authors Electric

A couple of weeks ago, I took a day off. The kids were at school, so it was just me and my wife. We popped into Edinburgh for the day and spent a fascinating couple of hours at the National Gallery exploring the Ray Harryhausen exhibition. We both grew up with these movies, so there was a distinct air of nostalgia as we wandered about. All the classic models were there - Pauline was especially delighted to see BoBo the owl (from Clash of the Titans) whereas I was more interested in the skeleton warriors from Jason and the Argonauts (I guess that shows where my interests lie…), but even more interesting was the back-story behind the movies. There was a whole series of sketches and drawings showing the development of the models, and you could trace the development of the idea from initial concept to finished creature, including all the problems encountered and how they were solved. I was most taken with the engineering drawings, showing how even the direction a bolt was fitted was ...

My favourite childhood books are the Moomintroll series written by Finnish author Tove Jansson. She was an artist and she illustrated her own books.  For me, as the reader, the illustrations were a big part of the magic because they worked so well with the text. Moomin Valley was a very real place, maybe because I was seeing it just as the author had created it. The Moomin house in Moomin Valley I was quite grown-up before I realised that Tove Jansson and her partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietila, had also created maps, tableaux and an actual five-story model of the Moomin House which was in the Moomin museum in Finland.   The big surprise was that the house they  made was different to the illustrations - it was square rather than round as it appears in the books and this puzzled me. The reason seems to be that it was specially made for a biennale of illustrations in Bratislava and was going to be exhibited in a corner.  The only way that Tove could make...